I would like to start off by saying that this is a really great site and has been and still will be useful resource for me to emerge myself in photography, as I'm new to it. I only have a point and shoot for the moment but will be upgrading to an SLR pretty soon.

Ok, onto the question:

Is it alright to Copy and Paste the photos from an SD card straight onto my laptop without using any software? I do it in this fashion so that I can retain the 4 digit number on the end of the filename. My concern is, will this manner of importing photos cause a loss in the image quality or even information?.

Like Zorro says, there won't be any problems and you won't suffer from a loss of quality. There has been some talk that opening and closing a jpeg over and over and over can cause a loss of quality, but I haven't actually seen any examples of that before with my own eyes.

Further to what Thomas said - my reading of it isn't so much that opening & closing will degrade the image, more that re-saving it will, over time, reduce the final quality. In my workflow (for what it's worth) I keep the image in a lossless format right up to the end. Only when I'm completely happy with the image will it be converted to jpeg, if at all.